Sunday, May 31, 2015

Staunton, May 31 – Russia’s shadow
economy and the self-sufficiency of Russians living outside of the major cities
of the country “have allowed Russia to survive the crisis and the introduction
of sanctions without large losses, according to five-year-long study of provincial
society carried out by sociologists at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.

According to the study’s findings,
Diana Yevdokimova writes in “Novyye izvestiya,” Russian provincial society is
characterized by a pattern of social stratification in which “the status of an
individual depends not on income but on his public authority and influence, his
status [with the authorities] and his membership in various clans, employment
and shadow groupings” (newizv.ru/society/2015-05-27/220147-zhizn-v-teni.html).

Consequently,
Yury Plyusnin, one of the authors of this study says, while Russians in the
cities are frightened as a result of sanctions, the nature of provincial
society with its self-organizing and self-supplying systems guarantees the
stability of the state and means that an economic crisis as understood in the
cities or abroad will not affect most residents.

According
to Simon Kordonsky of the Higher School of Economics, official sources say that
40 percent of Russia’s GDP is in the shadow sector. But in fact, he suggests,
the actual figure is much higher. As a result, “the country stands on a very
firm foundation,” one seldom described, and “lives according to its own laws
because for the state it doesn’t exist.”

People in this category, include those who do not work anywhere
officially, often move from place to place, and do not pay taxes.Some of them live in a natural or dacha
economy where they grow their own food. Others engage in “garage” production
where they produce and sell things but without reference to the state and its
rules.

“No fewer than a third of all rural
families live off water and forest resources of the country which are in no way
controlled by the state,” Plyusnin says. They may declare part of what they
harvest but far from all of it, and thus they have incomes which may be twice
or more what the state thinks they do.

In Yevdokimova’s words, the authors
of the study draw “several other important conclusions.” First, the
sociologists say that Russia must be understood not as a market economy but as
a resource economy. Second, the country’s social structure is one consisting of
various strata, some of which are connected to the state but many of which aren’t.

The sociologists identify four strata groups: the authorities
(five percent), the people (66 percent), the entrepreneurs (15 percent), and
the marginal (13 percent).

And third, they say, many Russians engage in seasonal work and
move among two, three or even more residences in the course of the year. As a result, Kordonsky says, there are really
two Russias, “one visible to the state and one invisible.”If the visible is in trouble because of the
crisis and sanctions, the invisible continues to function, not contributing
much to its members’ advancement but preventing them from falling even further
behind.

Staunton, May 31 – Many commentators
have suggested that Vladimir Putin is expressing outrage about the corruption
charges the US has brought against FIFA because of his fear that these cases
will be used to deprive Russia of its hosting of the 2018 World Cup competition,
an event that Putin hopes will win him even more plaudits than the Sochi Games.

He points out that the arrests of
FIFA officials may become “only the beginning of the collapse of a gigantic
corrupt pyramid build by soccer barons over the last decades and transforming a
popular form of sport into a real zone where everything goes.”That has the potential to threaten Russia’s
role of host in 2018.

But such arrests and trials in
Western courts may lead to something far more serious, and that is why Putin
and his entourage are reacting so emotionally even though so far they have not
made any reference to these larger outcomes, the Ukrainian commentator says.
The reasons for this pattern lie in “the psychology of the Russian leader and
of those who surrounding him.

“These people are not agitated at
all by accusations concerning the annexation of Crimea or the unleashing of war
in the Donbas. In their system of coordinates, those things are only politics.
The Americans fight in Iraq; we do so in Ukraine … The Americans forced the
Serbs to give up Kosovo; we have forced the Ukrainians to do the same in
Crimea.”

In their view, Russia is a great
power and if the Americans can do something so can they. Anyone who suggests
otherwise is engaged in “double standards.” Moreover, they are convinced that
as long as they hold power in their hands, no one will punish them for such
actions. They would be at risk only if they lost power.

But criminal cases are “an entirely
different thing.” They are something that Putin and his entourage “fear like
fire” because despite “all their self-confidence, Russian rulers like the leaders
of any other developing country headed by a corrupt military band are firmly
integrated in the Western world. There is their money, property, children and
services.”

To be sure, Portnikov continues,
they understand that “against a particular group of people may be introduced
political sanctions which can then be lifted, but criminal prosecution remains
outside of political conflict.” And consequently, for such elites, Putin’s
among them, it is “not comme il faut.”

Such elites have
enough self-awareness, Portnikov says, that “they understand that in the
contemporary world, they are not masters but petty thieves … and if in politics
they can show their weight with the help of death, then in ordinary life they
have nothing to oppose criminal prosecution in the West, except perhaps for
war.”

Putin has particular
reason to understand this equation, the Ukrainian commentator says, because he
rose to power because he unlike others in Boris Yeltsin’s circle showed himself
able to prevent the first Russian president from having to face the criminal
charges that Yeltsin himself feared most.

“Now a similar
danger threatens Putin himself or those closest to him,” and that is why he and
his regime are reacting so sharply to the FIFA arrests, Portnikov says, adding
that the whole case shows something else as well: “In the West, they understand
where his button is” and how to push it.

Staunton, May 31 – Fewer than one in
three residents of Moscow consist of ethnic Russians, according to a consultant
to one of the Russian force structures cited by AsiaRussia.ru this past week (asiarussia.ru/news/7667/).That figure is at odds with those of Rosstat,
but its appearance has major consequences for Russians, non-Russians and the Kremlin.

For Russians, always distrustful of
official census figures, it is certain to be viewed as an indication that their
country is becoming ever less Russian; for non-Russians, it will be viewed as showing
just the reverse; and for the Russian regime, this figure represents a
challenge to Vladimir Putin’s increasingly Russian nationalist policies.

Because Asiarussia.ru does not
provide any background on the consultant who provided these figures or on how
they were derived and because the portal is not an entirely disinterested party
given its support for non-Russians and especially Muslims, it is impossible to
know how accurate these figures are.

At the same time, however, there
have been frequent indications that the official Rosstat numbers are inaccurate
both because of the ways in which the information is gathered – many non-Russians
in Moscow avoid enumeration – and processed –officials boost the number of
ethnic Russians by folding in other groups into that category or by outright
falsification.

Consequently, while these figures
should be treated with caution, they may be useful as a corrective to some
official claims; and they are beyond doubt important because of the ways in
which they are going to drive the thinking of all the groups involved both in
Moscow itself and in the Russian Federation more generally.

According to this source, of the
10,969,000, people in Moscow, ethnic Russians form 31 percent, Ukrainians eight
percent, and Belarusians three percent, thus giving the Slavs as a group 42
percent of the total, still less than half of a city that many view as
archetypically Russian.

Of nationalities from within the
Russian Federation, Tatars, Bashkirs, and Chuvash, three nations from the
Middle Volga, form 10 percent of the Russian capital’s population, this source
says. (It notes there are more Tatars in Moscow than in Kazan.) Chechens, Daghestanis
and Ingush form four percent; Tsygane (Roma) form three percent; and Jews form
two percent.

Azerbaijanis form 14 percent of the
total, and Armenians five percent. Georgians form three percent. Central Asians
– Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz – form five percent. And Asians from
outside the former Soviet space – Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese – constitute five
percent of the total.All other
nationalities make up the remaining four percent.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Staunton, May 27 – Russian
governors, “even the most loyal” to the Kremlin, as a result of the
intensification of the economic crisis, find themselves between a rock and a
hard place and are beginning to complain about Moscow’s failure to articulate
an anti-crisis strategy which takes the interests of their regions into
account, according to Nikolay Petrov.

This does not mean that Moscow is at
risk of “regional fronds” like those in the 1990s: neither the regions nor
their leaders have the capacity to make themselves independent actors, Petrov
says. “But an increase in the economic and political independence of the
regions is inevitable” in the run-up to the 2016 elections.

Also “inevitable,” he suggests, are
fundamental changes in the regional elites, which have been degraded during
Putin’s time in office, because “some of them are not ready for such a turn of
events. And they will give way to more effective commands of crisis managers,”
in some cases with Moscow’s help and in others despite what Moscow is doing.

As anyone who has been following the
Russian media knows, governors have been retiring at a rapid rate in recent
months, some to put themselves in a position to win back their offices in
upcoming elections, others to take new positions at the center, and some
because they have proven unable to govern their regions under conditions of
economic stringency.

But all of these changes, especially
over the next two years, are going to affect center-periphery relations in the
Russian Federation, not transforming the country into a genuine federal system
but making the regions and their leaders more independent because both the
regions and Moscow need that at the present time.

“Today,” Petrov writes, “Russia if it is
a federation at all is more a federation of corporations than of regions,” with
the big companies like Gazprom, Lukoil, Russian Rail, and the like “generating
and controlling the main financial flows in the country” and in many cases
installing as governors their own people.

That makes the current situation of
regional politics “in part similar to what it was in the 1990s.”But, Petrov argues, “over the last 15 years,
regional elites have strongly degraded, the result of both intentional efforts
of the center and of negative selection,” something almost inevitable when loyalty
counts for more than effectiveness.

From his very first days in office,
Putin sought to “restore control” of Moscow over the regions. He created
presidential plenipotentiaries, chiefs of regional militias, and other federal
officials who were installed in regional governments.That worked more or less as long as oil
prices were high, but with their fall, it has become a problem and not just for
the regions.

“The strengthening of the vertical to a large extent
occurred at the expense of the weakening of horizontal ties,” something that
means that “federal structures in the regions today often coordinate their
actions very poorly.”Clearly, Petrov
says, Putin’s approach went too far and now there needs to be a correction of
some kind.

Initially,
he points out, Putin sought a solution through the creation of new bureaucratic
structures “with extraordinary authority.”The regional development ministry was broken up, and now there are three
ministries with specific regional responsibilities. Moreover, Moscow worked
hard to increase its direct control of governors.

The Kremlin doesn’t need “strong
politicians” like Yury Luzhkov, Mintimir Shaymiyev and Murtaza Rakhimov of the
1990s; it doesn’t even want relatively independent ones like those which have
been dismissed or even arrested in recent months. But it both needs and wants
effective managers, and such people have to have the authority to do their
jobs.

The September gubernatorial elections –
11 that had long been scheduled and nine more that have become necessary
because of changes of cadres – also are affecting this process, Petrov
argues.While candidates are still
selected primarily for their loyalty, they do need to be able to do their jobs
or Moscow faces problems.

“The system of administration at the
regional level is degrading,” and that has the effect, he argues of weakening “the
entire regional pyramid of power,” something that means Moscow is forced to
intervene when it really doesn’t want to and would not have to if there were
stronger people in office.

“This degradation,” Petrov concludes, is
especially dangerous in view of the fact that the center of gravity is inevitably
shifting to the regional level.” The governors will play a major role in the
2016 Duma elections, and if they don’t have the resources they need, they will
inevitably weaken the federal center in order to do what Moscow wants.

That in turn, Petrov says, will “create
the preconditions for a new strengthening of the regions” and of those who head
them.

Staunton, May 27 – The leaders of
the Caucasus Emirate have declared themselves part of ISIS, but such
declarations, given that many Salafis in the North Caucasus view the latter as
not being an Islamic project, an attitude Russian officials need to promote and
exploit, may have the effect of weakening the group there, according to Akhmet
Yarlukapov.

By taking an oath of allegiance to
ISIS, the popular Daghestani preacher Nadir abu Halid has raised questions
about the possibility that this will quickly and immediately lead to more
violence and instability not only in Daghestan but across the entire North
Caucasus, Yarlykparov acknowledges.

“In reality,” he says, “events are
developing in a very bad direction because ISIS is being popularized and field
commanders of various levels are swearing allegiance to this structure.”So many are doing so that it is possible to
say that the Emirate is “being transformed into one of the subdivisions of
ISIS.”

But at the same time, the Moscow
scholar points out, the Salafis of the North Caucasus are far from unanimous in
their assessment of such actions because many of them, including some of their
leaders, do not view ISIS as an Islamic pRuroject but rather as a narrowly
political one that is dividing the umma rather than uniting it.

Such attitudes, Yarlykarpov
continues, should be recognized and exploited so that there can be cooperation
with the Salafis rather than a new round of hostility based on the notion that
ISIS is Salafi and therefore all Salafis are for ISIS. “This is a mistake,” he
says, “and can only lead to the further loss” of Russian influence on these
communities.

Unfortunately, as the detention of
Daghestani Salafi leader Mukhammad Magomedov over the weekend shows, the
scholar says, the Makhachkla authorities are acting in exactly the opposite
way, a decision that may very well have extremely negative consequences in the
current environment.

According to Yarlykarpov, the Muslim
Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Daghestan which “controls the majority of
mosques” of the republic bears “the major responsibility” for ensuring that the
authorities do not act against Salafis there in a counterproductive way and
push those loyal to Russia into the arms of ISIS.

Staunton,
May 27 – “All successful authoritarian regimes,” that is those who are able to
ensure political stability, growth and economic and social modernization, “are
rational and pragmatic,” whereas the far more numerous instances of
unsuccessful authoritarian regimes tend to have leaders who act in irrational
and un-pragmatic ways, according to Vladimir Ryzhkov.

In
the first category, the opposition Russian politician says, are regimes like
China now, the Singapore of Lee Kwan Yew, the Chili of Pinochet, South Korea,
Mexico and Taiwan. In the second, he says, are dozens of regimes in Africa, the
Middle East, the post-Soviet space, and “alas, to an ever greater degree
Russia” (echo.msk.ru/blog/rizhkov/1555438-echo/).

All
these unsuccessful authoritarian countries and their elites “live in a world of
ideological illusions and chimeras having subordinated to a chimerical picture
of the world foreign and domestic enemies, have inadequately understood contemporary
economics, and isolated themselves from the world,” Ryzhkov continues.

Such
a false consciousness comes to dominate these peoples, and “as a result, they
ever more lose their present and future.”

“In
recent years,” he argues, “Russia has ever more shifted from the world of
rationality and pragmatism into the world of illusions and chimeras.Rational arguments are ever more replaced by
talk about sacred places, ‘a Russian world,’ blasphemy and saints, divine visions,
the special nature of Russian civilization, the holiness of military victories
and so on.”

The
myths of the past are coming back with the active support of government
propaganda, myths like the necessity and saving quality for Russia of “the
personal and autocratic power of one man and of the specialness and superiority
over all others of Russian civilization, which leads to isolation and a
rejection of modernization.”

“After all, what
should be changed if we are already the best of all?”

In this
chimerical world of Russia today, Ryzhkov continues, the authorities and the
state are presented as “sacred for the greatness of which (greatness being
understood exclusively as consisting of military might, territory and
geopolitical influence) any sacrifices and deprivations are permissible.”

And this false world is reinforced
by “the idea of a hostile environment, a standoff with the US and the West, as
a result of which the country always must be in the military status of ‘a
besieged fortress,’ arming itself against the foreign enemy and cracking down
on the internal enemy (defined as consisting of the intelligentsia and in
general all those who are dissatisfied.”

“This entire picture of the world is
illusory and false,” Ryzhkov says, “but it is precisely the one which ever more
defines today the domestic and foreign policy decisions of the Russian
authorities and makes their policies ever more unpredictable and irrational.”

That
is bad enough, but there is something worse: such a false picture of the world
guarantees ultimate failure: “Irrationalism and the withdrawal into a world of
illusions is the true path to backwardness and poverty, force and instability.”
To avoid that disaster, Ryzhkov insists, Russia must again “stand on the firm
path of rationalism and pragmatism.”

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Staunton, May 26 – Vladimir Putin’s
party of power, United Russia, failed to win a single seat in elections to the
15-member city council of Baltiysk in Kaliningrad, an indication of just how
soft support for his party and possibly for him is -- and of what steps Russian
opposition groups may be able to take to win elections where they occur
elsewhere.

The Baltiysk surprise is dominating
much of the Moscow media today, given that United Russia did not win a single
mandate. Instead, 12 independent candidates appear to have won through as well
as one each from Just Russia, the Patriots of Russia and the Communists of
Russia.

In a commentary in “Novyye
izvestiya,” Yekaterina Dyatlovskaya says that experts with whom she has spoken
explain United Russia’s failure as the result of high levels of participation,
scandals in the registration of candidates, and conflicts among the city and
regional elites (newizv.ru/politics/2015-05-26/220086-bez-edinogo-mandata.html).

Almost
half of the registered voters – 47.77 percent – took part, a level of
participation that Just Russia’s Pavel Fedorov said was unheard of in recent
elections there and that overwhelmed the ability of the party of power to win
on the basis of administrative measures alone. At the same time, he said, he
was surprised that that party did not win at least one seat.

Another
explanation for the outcome, he suggested, was the scandal which broke out when
officials refused to register 78 out of 139 candidates.That action was so gross, he implied, that
many local residents and businesses took the occasion of the election to
register their anger at official high-handedness.

A third explanation for the outcome was provided by Rostislav
Turovsky of the Center for Political Technologies. He pointed out that there
are serious differences within United Russia itself and that the regional boss
may be entirely happy that the city boss suffered this embarrassing loss.

According to Grigory Melkonyants, of the Golos vote monitoring
organization, all sides in the election used “doubtful technologies,” but this
had the effect of cancelling each of them out. The voting itself was relatively
good.He said that now the Russian
opposition must “study the experience of Baltiysk in order to learn how to
defeat [the powers’] administrative resource.”

Staunton, May 26 – As it has done so
often, the Russian government is increasing repression outside the capital and
thus outside the field of view of Western journalists and diplomats at a rapid
pace, something it may be able to do even more effectively if Moscow media
outlets follow the advice of some not to cover the plight of the victims of
such actions.

With regard to Karelia, Boris
Vishnevsky, a Yabloko deputy in St. Petersburg’s legislative assembly, says
that the authorities in that republic have launched criminal cases, searches
and arrests in the wake of the success opposition groups have had in winning
elections and calling attention to illegal actions by the head of the republic.

Five Yabloko leaders in Karelia have
had criminal charges brought against them, even though there is no evidence
supporting these cases. What there is, Vishnevsky says, is a political movement
in the republic which seeks the ouster of the republic head. It has been
holding meetings to make that demand – the most recent took place on May 20 –
and has collected more than 7,000 signatures on a petition to that effect.

What adds a certain piquancy to the
situation, Vishnevsky continues, is that Governor Khudilaynen appears to have
been guilty while occupying an earlier job of exactly the things he is charging
his opponents. He denies all wrongdoing, of course, but he gets angry whenever
anyone raises the issue.

“It is difficult to say what will
happen next in Karelia,” he says. “A great deal depends on how much coverage
these events get.” Unfortunately, he says, because these cases do not involve
high profile opposition figures and are taking place “beyond the borders of the
two capitals, the situation has attracted little attention from the federal media
with rare exceptions.”

A similar problem exists in the North
Caucasus. There, officials have detained a Circassian activist whose only crime
was that he wanted to meet other Circassians and mark the 151st
anniversary of the genocide of the Circassians by tsarist forces on May 21and
searched the house of those he hoped to meet with (caucasreview.com/2015/05/v-rf-nachalis-repressii-protiv-cherkesskih-aktivstov/).

That kind of illegal and
heavy-handed authoritarianism when directed at relatively low-ranking people
outside of Moscow rarely gets much attention, and it will get less if Russian
and western journalists follow the advice of those like Valery Tishkov, the
outgoing director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology.

Staunton, May 26 – Many believe that
the situation in Russian-occupied Crimea is “not so terrible” because there is
no war going on there, Abmezhit Suleymanov says. But in many ways, the
situation in Crimea is even worse: in the Donbas, “you know who your enemy is;”
in Crimea, there are enemies “all around you” and residents live in a state of
terror.

Some
high-profile cases of this terror have attracted international attention, but
activists in Crimea and in Kyiv say that there are far more lower-level ones
that pass unnoticed and that even they are not able to register and thus
provide documentation to national and international bodies.

It
appears, they say, that “Russia needs Ukrainian ‘spies,’ ‘snipers,’ and ‘terrorists’”
and has a variety of charges officials may use or actions some of them or
ordinary pro-Moscow people may employ to repress anyone who is not
enthusiastically on the side of the new order following the Anschluss.

Aleksandra
Matviichuk, president of the Kyiv-based Center for Civic Freedoms, says that “such
‘a menu’ is used by the occupation authorities for suppressing the initiatives
of representatives of civil society” and that “their victims are people of the
most varied professions, ages, and activities. But they are all united by the
fact that they are publicly active and not under the control of the occupation
authorities.”

Tamila
Tasheva, coordinator of the Crimea SOS organization, says that “the
international community is devoting more attention to what is taking place in
[the Donbas than in Crimea]. And this is logical, but in Crimea we see a kind
of undeclared war when every day there are violations of human rights. And
there are hundreds of them.”

Rights
activists in Kyiv say that in the last three months alone, there have been 94
interrogations in Crimea, 22 searches, 78 detentions and arrests, 13 trials, as
well as cases of torture and beatings.And that enumeration, they say, is far from complete given that many of
these crimes are not reported.

What
is especially worrisome is that the occupation officials increasingly
coordinate their work with the criminal grouping known as “the Crimean
Self-Defense Force,” whose members employ extra-legal means to repress the
population, including beatings, denunciations and other actions characteristic
of a terror regime.

She
continues that there are some things that can be done: Crimeans need to arrange
in advance with lawyers so that when something is done, they will be in a
better position to get the word out and defend themselves. And both Ukrainian
and international organizations need to get involved in this horrific
situation.

“We
know,” another activist says, “that the Russian side does not allow a UN
mission on human rights onto the territory of the peninsula.” But that doesn’t
mean that individual countries can’t send their own missions or at least try to
and thus spread the word about what is happening and thereby encourage Crimeans
to defend their rights.

Suleymanov
adds that “the repressive regime is doing everything it can to take under
control the representative organ of the Crimean Tatars, the Mejlis and
Kurultay,” including attacks, arrests, and the creation of alternative bodies
that the occupiers seek to present as genuine.

“Today
it is very difficult to live in Crimea,” he says, but “to live in occupation
and to feel that no one supports you is doubly difficult. People must understand
that there is no law or organization which now works in Crimea to defend the
rights of these people” – and they are numerous.

Moscow
claims and many outsiders believe that many in Crimea support the occupation,
but this is not the case, Suleymanov says. “In Crimea live and struggle those
who believe to this day that Crimea is Ukraine and must be.”What matters now is that they not be left to
face the occupiers “one on one.”

Monday, May 25, 2015

Staunton, May 25 – “The
Ukrainian-Russian conflict is to a significant degree a conflict between the
heirs of Kievan Rus [Ukraine] and the heirs of the Golden Horde” [Moscow], according
to Andrey Piontkovsky, and one of its key results will be “an intensification
of the swallowing of Russia by China.”

Instead, he argues, it is part of a
long ongoing process that has accelerated in the course of the Ukrainian crisis
of “the swallowing of Russia by China.” At the recent Victory Day parade in
Moscow, something “symbolic” happened that had never occurred “in the thousand
year history of Russia:” three units of the Chinese military took part.

“For the Chinese who devote enormous
importance to symbols,” Piontkovsky says, “this was as it were a parade of
their victory” because it represented “a foretaste of their complete victory
over Russia.”

A year ago, the Chinese clearly
signaled that this is how they view things: Beijing’s prime minister told a
gathering in St. Petersburg that “you have big territories, and we have many
Chinese workers. Let’s unite these resources for the strengthening of our
common economic potential.”

The Chinese had never permitted
themselves to express such notions so boldly, the Russian analyst continues;
but it is clear that they now have “complete confidence that having cut itself
off from Western civilization, Putin’s Russia will become an easy catch” for
Beijing.

That is all the
more so, Piontkovsky continues, because there are influential people in Russia
itself who “welcome this process” because they “consider the Golden Horde to
have been the golden age of Russian history.” Thus, “the swallowing of Russia
by China is a return to its deepest historical roots.”

Those who think in this way have a
certain measure of truth on their side, the Russian commentator concludes, and
that in turn means that the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia is “to
a significant degree” a conflict between the two states these two countries
emerged from, Kievan Rus in the case of Ukraine and the Golden Horde in the
case of Russia.

Staunton, May 25 – Given the
recrudescence of Soviet institutions in the Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbas,
ever more people are playing the game of “what if” – “what if” the August 1991
putsch or October 1993 clash in Moscow had ended another way or “what if” the
anti-Bolshevik White Russians had defeated Lenin and returned to power.

In a commentary today, Boris
Pastukhov, a Russian historian at St. Antony’s College in Oxford, says that
such an approach to history is not very profitable most of the time but that if
one engages in it now, it is far more useful to think about “what ifs” in the
case of Moscow than in the case of the Donbas (http://polit.ru/article/2015/05/25/countrrevolution/).

That is because, he suggests, a kind
of alternative history has “already been partially realized” under Vladimir
Putin, allowing one to suggest that in certain respects at least, Putinism can
be understood as “the victory of the White Movement,” more than 90 years after
it suffered what seemed to all intents and purposes its complete loss.

So much ink has been spilled on what
Russia might have looked like had the Whites won, Pastukhov says, first among
emigres and then among Russians at home after the collapse of the Soviet
Union.But now there are some real
reasons for taking seriously the idea that we can now see the outlines in life
itself of what that victory might have meant.

Imagine for a minute, the historian
says, that “in October 1919, Yudenich had taken Petrograd. His victory would
have allowed the consolidation of the actions of the White Armies and the
formation of a White government which would have finally taken under its full
control the territory of the former Empire (except some of its border parts).”

With that achievement, however, “the
first – ‘heroic’ – part of history would have come to an end.”And the new government would have been forced
to confront the fact that its victory over Bolshevism had “solved only one of
many problems.”Pastukhov suggests that
there would have been at least five:

First, with the empire dead and a lack of desire for the generals to remain in power, there would be the question of just what kind of a political system should and even could be erected in place of the old order.

Second, there would have emerged enormous administrative problems: “all organs of power would have been just as corrupt as before, workers would have been just as dissatisfied, the national minorities would have been just as oppressed, and inequality as before would have been enormous. There would have been too much centralism and too few skilled cadres.

Third, “the majority of the leaders of the movement who would have seized power earlier were not administrators of the first rank: many went from colonel to army general in only a few years” and few of them had any real understanding of how to rule a civilian population.

Fourth, “support from abroad would have stopped,” with both victors and vanquished focusing on their own problems rather than on Russia. Consequently, the new regime would have been largely on its own.

And fifth, that regime would have been lacked the forces necessary to recover the Baltic states “and certain other of its territories ‘from time immemorial,’ including possibly Ukraine. And there would have begun active democratic transformations,” changes that would have echoed in Russia itself.

“Under recently, it would have been
possible only to guess how the counterrevolutionary government of ‘the victors’
would have responded to all these challenges.”But now, observing what Putin is doing, one can very likely see the
outlines of what it would have done as well., the historian suggests.

According to Pastukhov, “the flag of
Putin’s Russia should be not the white-blue-red” it has adopted “but simply red
and white because its ideological foundation is a combination of two
counterrevolutions, the Bolshevik and the anti-Bolshevik,” a pattern that goes
a long way to explain “the paradoxical quality of contemporary Russian
policies.”

One can debate for a long time why the
Soviet system failed, but there can be now doubt that at least for some
decades, “the red movement successfully realized its counterrevolutionary plan,”
first by sacrificing to others what it did not have the strength to hold and
then rebuilding that strength and taking most of what it wanted back.

Would the White Movement have been
similarly able to do so remains a mystery, Pastukhov says. But now there may be a test of that: “the
hypothetic ‘white counterrevolution’ has found its embodiment in ‘the red
counterrevolution,’ and the alternative scenario which lost a century ago has
become a real political scenario for Russia of the 21st century.”

“One needn’t waste time on
reconstruction,” Pastukhov says. “turn on the television and study the course
of alternative history.”

That development, he suggests,
raises “the curious question” about what is likely to be the fate of today’s
Russian political emigres: will they be future “’Lenins’” who will return and
take power, or will they be “a second edition of ‘the white emigration,’ whose
nostalgic dreams remained just that?”

Staunton, May 25 – Dmitry Bukovsky
of Kyiv’s “Delovaya stolitsa” continues his series, “The Top 5 Propaganda Myths,
Fakes and Stupidities of the Kremlin for the Week.”And this week, Russia has really outdone
itself with the very top item being a claim that Vladimir Putin was either
Prince Vladimir who baptized Kievan Rus or the Apostle Paul in a past life.

How Many Past Lives has Putin Had?Russians have a long history of portraying their current leaders as
wonder-working icons. In recent months, some have portrayed Stalin as a saint
in this way. But now, a certain Mother Fotinya, the head of a sectarian group
in Nizhny Novgorod, has taken the next step: She says that in “one of his past
lives, Putin was Prince Vladimir and baptized Russia” and that he has returned
to “baptize anew our pagan land.”Earlier she declared that Putin in another past life had been the
Apostle Paul (regnum.ru/news/cultura/1490540.html).

Soviet Pioneer Movement Reborn in Occupied Territories.On May 19, the
occupation authorities in Makeyevka solemnly revived the Pioneers, the Soviet
youth movement, with Soviet, Russian and Donetsk Peoples Republic flags flying,
a monument to Putin standing by, and with speakers proclaiming that these
children “unlike in Ukraine are not fighting their own history” (antimaydan.info/2015/05/vozrozhdenie_pionerii_v_novorossii_307083.html).

Not a Week
without a Crucifixion. Devotees of Moscow propaganda would undoubtedly be disappointed
if their media sources did not report on yet more horrific killings by “Ukrainian
punitive detachments.”This week for
their delectation, Moscow offered a picture of the supposed killing of a
militant and his “’pregnant wife.’”But
even Russian commentators recognized that the whole thing had been staged and
had never occurred (voicesevas.ru/news/yugo-vostok/13921-akciya-ustrasheniya-foto-video-18.html).

Everyone Can Speak with Russian POWs in Ukraine -- Except Of
Course Moscow.The same day Moscow complained Ukrainian officials had
failed to give Russian diplomats access to Russian soldiers held by Kyiv (tvzvezda.ru/news/vstrane_i_mire/content/201505221540-n1i0.htm),
one of these soldiers, Yevgeny Yerofeyev told Russian journalists that everyone
has come to see him: representatives of the UN, the Red Cross, and the OSCE. “All
have asked whether I am alive and well and whether I’m being given treatment.
All have come,” he said, “except the embassy of Russia” (novayagazeta.ru/politics/68506.html).

There Must Be American
Soldiers in Ukraine. Although
Moscow continues to deny that there are any Russian soldiers in Ukraine, its
media have gone out of their way to point to what they say is evidence of an
American military presence there. This week, Vladimir Putin’s favorite news
source, Lifenews.ru, reported that a group of more than 40 Americans from a
private security firm had arrived in Ukraine as the first wave of a veritable
invasion.There was no truth to the
story but that didn’t prevent Moscow from putting it out with imaginary details
or from using this report to muddy the waters (lifenews.ru/news/154229).